Fighting fierce, even as Taliban numbers fall

Afghanistan

Dexter Filkins, New York Times

Published 4:00 am, Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Photo: David Guttenfelder, AP

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U.S. Marines from 3rd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment take cover in an open poppy field during a firefight as Taliban fighters fire on them in the town of Marjah in Afghanistan's Helmand province on Monday Feb. 15, 2010. less

U.S. Marines from 3rd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment take cover in an open poppy field during a firefight as Taliban fighters fire on them in the town of Marjah in Afghanistan's Helmand province on Monday Feb. ... more

Photo: David Guttenfelder, AP

Fighting fierce, even as Taliban numbers fall

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As heavy fighting in the insurgent stronghold of Marja carried into its third day, the number of Taliban fighters in the area has dropped by about half, U.S. and Afghan commanders said Monday.

About a quarter of the 400 Taliban fighters estimated to be in Marja when the Afghan-U.S. operation began early Saturday have been killed, officers said. A similar number of Taliban appear to have fled the area, including most of the leaders, and local Afghans were offering help ferreting out Taliban fighters and hidden bombs, they said.

But intense fighting on the ground through much of the day indicated there were plenty of Taliban insurgents with fight left in them. In Marja itself, a broad agricultural area crisscrossed by irrigation canals, the fighting appeared to be concentrated in two areas, at the northern end of the district and at the center. There, the combat on Monday continued at a furious pace.

Among the Taliban fighters still in Marja, U.S. and Afghan officials said, morale appears to be eroding fast, in part because the holdouts feel abandoned by their leaders and by local Afghans who are refusing to shelter them.

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"They cannot feed themselves, they cannot sustain themselves - that is what we are hearing," Col. Scott Hartsell told a group of senior officers at a briefing near Marja that included Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of NATO forces, and Abdul Rahim Wardak, the Afghan minister of defense. "They are calling for help and they are not getting any."

Some of the U.S. and Afghan commanders said they hoped to complete the combat phase of the operation within three or four days.

The details of the assessment, the most extensive made public on the Marja operation, could not be independently verified. But whatever the accuracy of the briefing, it did not lessen the ferocity of the battle at various points on the ground.

With the sort of hit-and-run tactics they were employing, small numbers of guerrillas appeared capable of holding out for long periods, and exacting the maximum effort from the NATO and Afghan forces to defeat them.

Despite the encouraging reports from the field, the U.S. military and Afghan government had to contend with plenty of difficulties, in Marja and in other locations.

There were conflicting accounts of a missile strike that killed at least 11 civilians on Sunday. U.S. officials said they had in fact hit the target they intended, a description that did not match accounts from Marines and other witnesses on the ground.

NATO officials said on Monday that eight Afghan civilians were killed and three wounded in four separate episodes, three of which occurred inside the area where the Marja operation was unfolding.

Also Monday, five civilians were killed and two were wounded in an air strike in Zhari, a district in neighboring Kandahar province. A patrol of Afghan and NATO forces spotted a group of residents digging a ditch on the roadside, and they mistook them for insurgents planting a bomb. They called in an air strike.

The deaths are troubling to the U.S. and NATO commanders, who have made protecting civilians the overriding objective of their campaign.